Air Traffic Controller Explores Intersecting Lives in New Release

September 0700:092017

A new release explores how lives are intertwined. Some call it “six degrees of separation” — the idea that any two people on earth can be connected by a chain of a “friend of a friend” statements in a maximum of six steps. This concept was first touted by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929 and popularized in a play written by John Guare in 1990, according to Wikipedia.

Patrick Geary, in his debut novel Roxie (Redemption Press 2017), explores the lives of two characters whose lives intersect. Geary, a full-time air traffic controller, says the idea came to him when he was nineteen years old as he was reading a road map and a dot on the map representing Roxie, Mississippi caught his eye. He wondered what it was like, who lived there, and what their lives were like.

Geary says, “I pictured some nineteen-year-old Roxie kid sitting somewhere beneath that tiny black dot, maybe looking at a road map himself, wondering the same things I was wondering.” From there, the story of Blue and Smith, two young men who don’t know each other and live in different states, emerges. Blue has never left the state of Maryland. Smith has never been in love.

By the end of the next week, neither of these statements will still be true. Roxie alternates between Blue’s story in urban Baltimore and Smith’s in rural Mississippi, following ten days that will transform their lives. This thought-provoking story of redemption, resiliency, personal growth, and the interconnectedness of us all, builds to a thought-provoking conclusion as the two men’s lives ultimately collide.